About the Course

Introduction

This course addresses insights from long-standing experience in teaching economics, conducting and leading research, and providing high-level policy and global advice in applied areas. It also acts as a foundation for India-relevant intellectual inquiry. This course provides a crucial bridge through an updated set of premises, examples, and topics, to understand how an updated, future-facing economics can be constructed and situated in the world.

Learning Objectives

• To discuss the rise and challenges of knowledge creation in economics 
• To introduce the complex nature of evidence and analysis, the role of data in core areas of economics such as development and technological advance. 
• To illustrate philosophical and practical elements- framing, evidence, inference and judgement- of institutional and evolutionary economics and economics’ toolbox which are not discussed in most university curriculum.

Intended Outcomes

• Understanding of foundational ideas in economics and its varied types of reasoning 
• First exposure to cutting-edge, unresolved debates in the discipline and contemporary applications 
• Appreciation of the sophistication of economics as well as its limits as a changing discipline.

What makes this course different?

This is not a generic Economics 101. This is a cutting-edge foundational economics course as part of a wider sequence from irrelevance to relevance in development, culture and contemporary applications. 

Why take this course? 

Economics is a foundational discipline in its own right, central to stated assumptions as well as crucial misunderstandings made in a range of other disciplines from STEM to business and management, to those studying the structure of society and topics from AI to healthcare. Economics is a type of essential literacy. A foundational understanding of thinking, gaps, challenges, and practical examples in economics is therefore highly relevant to anyone wanting to understand the field and become more relevant in their professions. However, most economics is taught in entry- and even mid-level courses stripped of its philosophy, history, and much-needed complexity. It is also stripped of its relevance to everyday culture, deriving much of its reasoning and examples from the West and consequently perpetuating problem-framing and cognitive dissonance with other contexts. 

Thus while economics is currently taught the world over and studied by many, it is yet to build sturdy intellectual bridges to other philosophies and cultures. This course is therefore intended as part of a 3-part sequence (The Foundations of Economics, Modelling and Reasoning in Economics, IKS and Nyaya Shastra) with continuity and high-relevance in the New Education Policy for Indian Knowledge Systems. 

If you wish to engage in a global debate on economics, its knowledge structure and institutions, this is the course to build a first foundation layer to explore the frontiers of the discipline.

Path to Innovate in Economics

• Learn about the scientific basis for economics and its main debates about theory, methods, and relevance.
• Understand the main elements of the history and contested philosophical underpinnings of economics. 
• Uncover the progression of core ideas of economics and the challenges from within the discipline alongside the evolution of the academic debates. 
• Follow major applied contemporary challenges for economics and its future knowledge creation.

Highlights 

• Provides learners a first dive into major theory and methods development in economics 
• Adopts a phenomenology-driven approach to discussing advance in this discipline and to contemporary development challenges such as healthcare and AI 
• Empowers learners to develop critical thinking on complex topics such as industrial development and technological advance 
• Urges learners to consider how and why disciplinary boundaries emerge and shift.
• Exposes learners to core sub-fields of economics such as institutional economics, behavioural economics, complexity and evolution, their advantages and state of the art. 
• Helps learners gain insight into contemporary crises in the knowledge core of economics and its challenges of method and data.

Syllabus Outline 

• What is economics as a body of knowledge? Science, the Scientific Method and the History of Economics. 
• The battlefield of Economics. Scope History of Economic Thought; Positivist, Normative, Descriptive, etc. Should it be history of Western Economies?  e.g. Development Economics What context is most of economics grounded? History, context, debate. E.g. History of Economic Thought sequences, Foundational Ideas in economics and Famous Economists, The Nobels, and their blindspots or decline, 
• The methodologies of Economics. The professional aspects of economics: banks and investment, policy design, public health, law etc. Economic development as both mainstream and heterodoxy. at a crisis point Political Economy, “Heterodoxy” and the fight.
• Institutional economics, evolutionary economics, ‘behavioural economics vs others, What are institutions and organizations etc. Practical considerations of life, how does economics stack up, reassess, improve?
• Industrial Development as a place of study. Technological advance and its study. The Knowledge and Learning economy, Labour markets and skills
• Economics and the Scientific Method. Is economics a science? E.g. of Institutional and evolutionary economics: “Rigour”, what is the purpose of the scientific method in economics? 
• Some Contemporary Applications and the realm of actual economics- Health, AI, IPR
• The Future of Economics and can IKS contribute? A brief mention of Nyaya darshana and entourage of later courses.